Facilitating Comprehension of Non-Native English Speakers during Lectures in English with STR-Texts

ARTICLE

Abstract

We provided texts generated by speech-to text-recognition (STR) technology for non-native English speaking students during lectures in English in order to test whether STR-texts were useful for enhancing students' comprehension of lectures. To this end, we carried out an experiment in which 60 participants were randomly assigned to a control group (i.e., 30 participants who learned without STR-texts) and an experimental group (i.e., 30 participants who learned with STR-texts). Our results showed that the participants in the experimental group outperformed those in the control group. Our second objective was to explore the effectiveness of STR-texts on the learning performance of the experimental-group participants with different levels of English as a Foreign Language ability, that is, high and low. The results showed that the low ability students had lower self-efficacy than the high ability students. The results also showed no significant effect of STR-texts on the post-test scores of the low and high ability participants after controlling for the effect of English as a Foreign Language ability. No significant difference was found in cognitive load and anxiety of the low and high ability participants. Based on the implications of our findings, several suggestions are made for the teaching and research communities.